Laboratoire d'Annecy de Physique des Particules

JANUARY 2017: Advanced Virgo is coming

2017-04-05T07:16:24Z

The new detector Advanced Virgo is under commissioning phase and should start to take data in the year 2017, in coincidence with the Advanced LIGO detectors (observation runs called O2 and O3).

A more performant detector, Advanced Virgo, has been installed and is currently under commissioning and noise hunting. It should start to take data in the year 2017.
The two Advanced LIGO detectors have started a second scientific data taking (observation run O2) since November 2016. Advanced Virgo has foreseen to join this data taking and should improve the localisation of the gravitational wave sources detected in coincidence with LIGO.

FEBRUARY 2016: Gravitational waves detected!

2017-04-05T07:07:45Z

First direct detection of gravitational waves!! The two detectors Advanced LIGO have done a first scientific data taking from September 2015 to January 2016 and the data analysis done by the LIGO-Virgo collaboration has provided the first observation of a gravitational wave event.

The annoucement has been done on Febuary 11th 2016.
This gravitational wave was coming from the coalescence of two black holes of 29 and 36 times the solar mass, located about 1.3 billion years from the Earth. More information is available on the Virgo web

2007-2011: first scientific data taking

2017-02-02T13:20:02Z

Information about the last results of the LIGO-Virgo data analysis or the current status of the Advanced Virgo detector are available from the news web page of the Virgo experiment

The Virgo experiment has already done four scientific runs: VSR1 (may - october 2007), VSR2 (july 2009 - january 2010), VSR3 (july - october 2010) , et VSR4 (june - october 2011), with a sensitivity allowing to detect some gravitational waves sources as far as 12 Mpc (about 40 millions light-years). The three first scientific runs were done in coincidence with the two american LIGO detectors. The common data analyses LIGO-Virgo of those data did not find any gravitational wave candidate.

La meilleur sensibilité obtenue par Virgo depuis 2007

A more sensitive detector, Advanced Virgo, is currently under installation and should take first data in the year 2017, in coincidence with the detectors Advanced LIGO (scientific runs O2 and O3).

Advanced LIGO has already done a first scientific run from September 2015 to January 2016 and the common LIGO-Virgo analysis of those data has provided the first detection of a gravitational wave. This gravitation wave was coming from the coalescence of two massive black holes, 1.3 billion light-years from the earth.